Amazon finally launches a CDN

That only took 21 months since I asked them nicely. What I don’t like about what I’ve read so far is that they are not using a lazy-loading proxy (ala Akamai, EdgeCast, Panther) and are instead opting for S3 as the content origin. That sucks, because it basically means that you have to do something in order to get your content onto their network. With a lazy-loading proxy, you just tell your CDN provider to effectively make static.whatever.com a mirror of www.whatever.com. It’s much simpler.

3 thoughts on “Amazon finally launches a CDN”

They’ll need lazy-loading need to recruit you and your ilk, but it’s only round one for Amazon in this game, so no surprise they focused on existing customers who already put everything on s3 (like me). And if the price is right, and the service is good, I bet even if Amazon is slow to add that feature, someone else will – same way they have businesses growing up around making their other services easy to use.

To be clear, I think that this still has some value, especially for those of us who have stuff on S3. Otherwise, I think someone just took a big bite out of CacheFly’s market share.

A low-end EC2 box doesn’t contain built-in redundancy or, more importantly, the fancy routing juice that you need to have a successful CDN. Amazon will totally build the lazy-loading scheme at some point. It’s a key feature of every semi-serious CDN out there.